Tons of New Updates!

There have been a bunch of new updates added to the official Dragon Empires site in the past couple days for your reading enjoyment:

First up we have a great competition:

Dragon Empires sound competition!As promised it is time for our sound competition. As you may remember we previously wrote a dev diary on sound you can read here. In this diary we had three sounds from the game, one of them a mystery sound. If you can tell us which creature you think this is you could win some great prizes! The creature is one that is either on the page or has been spoken of before so that should narrow down your search.

For the winner we have two brand-new games, Soldiers: Heroes of WW2 and Perimeter, a Dragon Empires beta account, a Dragon Empires T-Shirt and a Dragon Empires poster. This time around we also have a booby prize for the most awful entry. Yes, if you are judged most awful then you can win your very own, slightly used, Richard Clayderman CD!

Kronic interviews Ivanhoe and Darksider of The Red Lions:When Darksider e-mailed me, giving me the chance to interview Ivanhoe and himself on The Red Lions I quickly jumped at the opportunity and despite having a broken hand I managed to type out the questions to ask them (hey I need some sympathy!) [Editors' Note: awww poor Kronic :p]

Kronic: When was The Red Lions (TRL) formed?Ivanhoe: 27th April 2002.Kronic: Very precise, hehe.Ivanhoe: Yep, it says so on our website... or so I've been told.

Kronic: So do you guys currently play any games with the rest of the TRL members, or are you all just doing your own things till DE starts?Ivanhoe: We're pretty much just all doing different things at the moment, but I believe we've got a little Counterstrike contingent going. We are currently making our own RPG about DE you can play different characters from our clan in it (like me).Darksider: And me!Ivanhoe: So all you Ivanhoe wannabe's, this is your chance! Don't abuse my beautiful body though.Kronic: K... I won't don't worry..I'll abuse Darksider's instead...Ivanhoe: lol.* Darksider hides*

Robc Echoes on about beta testersRobc has written an interesting piece on beta testing and what that means:

Dragon Empires Beta 1.0... is not that far away. This article may help prevent you from falling into pitfalls as a beta tester if you get selected and have never done it before.

So why do you really want to be in beta? Are you looking to play for free? Are you looking to be the first to get a chance to play? Are you looking to learn the game so well that you will dominate soon after release? Are you just trying to get a free look so that you can move on if it's not what you are expecting? Are you looking for career options? Some other reason maybe? Uhm, and of course hard core programmer types can just skip to the end of this article... we already know that you simply love the process of debugging code. Finding bugs in games is nothing short of pure unadulterated ecstasy for you! ;)

Stratics interviews ProdigyProdigy, world builder for Dragon Empires, is interviewed by Stratics in this revealing article:

Robc:World building for DE will never really be done? right?

Prodigy: Well we have to decide when the cut-off is done; otherwise the game never gets released... But it's always been my priority to keep adding more stuff right up until the last minute. Some stuff obviously has to be in before release such as monsters, cities, teleports etc whereas we can keep adding scenery dressing forever, but that's because it doesn't really directly affect the gameplay.

Robc:So when are you gonna be done? We're ready now! :)

Prodigy: Don't ask me, ask the programmers! A game such of this is very heavily feature driven, which is basically dictated by the programming schedule... We obviously can't release the game if the combat system doesn't work, whereas we could technically release the game without any rocks. As long as all the main World Building items are in the games and tested then we can go.